Ibn Sīnā's Solution to Kant's Challenging View of Existence

Jerome Shaffer (1962) claimed that Kant's view on existence leads to two problems—what I call "the problem of contradiction" and "the problem of insignificance." The former shows that existential propositions are analytic, while Kant asserted that they are synthetic. According to the latter, Kant's view implies that in the act of predicating either, the subjects do not have and cannot capture their exact extensions and/or no predicate could be a "real" predicate. After formulating the two problems, Ibn-Sīnā's views concerning essence, existence, and their relations are explained. Then, it is shown how the problems can find satisfactory solutions on the basis of Ibn-Sīnā's views.